My final warning [in Chapter 3] concerns the labels
that researchers attach to their correlation coefficients. There are
no
hard and fast rules that dictate when labels such as strong
or moderate or weak should be used. In other
words, there is subjectivity involved in deciding whether a given r is
high or low. Not surprisingly, researchers are
sometimes biased (by how they wanted their results to turn out)
when they select an adjective
to describe their obtained rs. Being aware that
this happens, you need to realize that you have the full right to look
at a researcher's r and label it however you wish, even if your
label is different from the researcher's.